Tuesday, July 21, 2009

I learned a lot of things at the letterboxing con. I learned, for instance, that you can pick padlocks with a soda can. Anyone in the TV room at the dorms Sunday night would have seen me making my very own lock picking tools. I decided not to take them back with me to Seattle, however, thinking it might look a bit suspicious going through security at the airport. I can always make more later! =)

I also learned that you never, ever want to share a room with Wassamatta_u--or sit in the front row of any talk he gives. (I do hope those eyebrows on the kids grow back.)

I also learned a few new letterboxing terms that I had never heard before. Several of my favorites I've added to the AQ glossary.

slink-boxing: Often seen at large events when large numbers of letterboxers look for a limited number of boxes. They stretch out as they walk to a box, then snap together when they stop to log in at the box, not unlike a human slinky.

slank-boxing: A combination of slack-boxing and slink-boxing. A group will slink to the box, then a designated person or two will ink up the stamp for everyone to make the stamping process go faster for the slack-boxers. Sometimes the slack-boxers won't even log their own stamp into the logbook due to limited logbook pages and the time involved.

S.P.O.P.: Short for Suspicious Pile Of People. Typically seen during large events where there are considerably more people than letterboxes. The people tend to cluster around the limited number of boxes, and at a certain point, you don't even need to follow clues anymore. You just look around for suspicious piles of people. "There must be a box over there--13 people are logging into something!"

ink in my ears: When you are confused or not sure that you heard a statement correctly, you have ink in your ears. For example, you might say, "I must have ink in my ears--I thought you just said that you went to a brothel after finding my letterbox!" The first known use of this term was by wassamatta_u. Not a big shock there.

11 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Oh yes, there was a LOT of slank boxing going on. It's going to take months for the ink to disappear from under my nails as I was often the "Ink Mistress."(the female who inks up for everyone...as opposed to the "Ink Master").

I learned that the sum doesn't always equal the parts. Case in point...we had fantastic carvers combine to make a stamp we could leave behind at our lunch...and it was one of the crappiest stamps I have ever worked on...lol. Of course, using others' tools, not having a magnified light in that dark room, using a scrap of pre-carved PZ Cut, drinking 4 gallons of root beer before carving, dodging spit balls, Sweet-n-Low packets and straw wrappers while you are carving...all of these things contributed to the final product!

I learned in the cemetary that when you have a group of 20 or so people, it is best to have one designated inker and stamper and just make everyone pass their logbooks down an assembly line for stamping. Ford really knew what he was doing when he invented the assembly line and apparently it can be applied to letterboxing as well!

I admit, I taught 3 little girls how to cheat... With them having shorter legs, we were behind a number of S.P.O.P.s in the first group to the cemetary. Having scoped out the cemetary a month earlier, I scanned the clues and said "Ooh, I know where the parking lot is. Let's skip ahead of them to #3." Ashamedly (OK, not), I also once told the girls "Go stand over there and look cute; I bet that next group will let you stamp first." (Although to my credit we then chose to go after a different box.)

I learned be careful returning to your car with a pregant woman late at night in the cemetary. The boogey man just might jump out from behind the car and put her into labor. Actually no babies were delivered as a result of the Boogey Man AKA Ryan.Get A Life (almost renamed Get A Baby)

My favorite part of the cemetery was when Ryan came over to scare Kitty trax by putting his head near hers and hissing (for lack of a better term) and Kitty looked over and said, "oh, hi!" we laughed over that all night! but in the zombies defense kitty is a paramedic and has the "I've seen it all already" attitude....

You missed a term. Credit Talking Turtle with "Factory Boxing". This is where a pile o' boxes is plunked in the middle of a group of boxers and the stamps get passed round the circle as fast as humanly possible. Reconnecting the assorted logs/stamps/boxes in the correct configuration becomes the challenge of the last person to touch the pile :)